If You Want a Good Woman

The bathroom light in that apartment was too bright. I remember that more than I remember anything else about the night. I had one of those bulbs in there, the kind supposed to look like daylight, and at 11:47 at night, standing in front of the mirror in a t-shirt I had been wearing for two days, daylight was the last thing I wanted.

I had just gotten off the phone. It does not matter with who. It matters that I had spent forty minutes explaining to her, in the calm, patient voice a man uses when he is lying to himself, why the situation we were in was her fault. I had a case. I had built it carefully. I had exhibits. When I hung up, I felt, for about eight seconds, like a lawyer who had just won.

Then I looked in the mirror.

If you want a good woman, be a better man.

I do not know where the sentence came from. I did not read it anywhere. I did not hear anybody say it. It just showed up, the way things show up when you have finally stopped talking long enough for the truth to get a word in. I said it out loud. I said it again. Then I turned the light off, because I could not stand to look at the man it was talking to.

That was a while ago. I have said the sentence a lot of times since. I have written it a lot of times since. I posted it, eventually, on a Tuesday night, along with seven other things I had been chewing on for years, and the post got legs I did not expect it to get. That post is why this book exists. That bathroom is why the post existed.

I want to be careful here at the beginning, because I know what happens when a man writes a sentence like that one. Half the people who hear it clap for the wrong reason. They think it is a scolding of somebody they know. Their brother. Their ex. The man on the news last week. They hear "be a better man" and they hand the sentence to someone else like a summons.

The sentence is not a summons. It is a mirror. It was a mirror the night it showed up in mine. It has been a mirror every day since. If you cannot read it as a mirror, you should probably put this book down, because the rest of it is going to keep being a mirror, and mirrors get uncomfortable if you have never spent much time in front of one.

It is not saying: if you become a better man, a good woman will appear. That is a transaction, and love does not run on transactions. Plenty of men have done a lot of interior work and are still, at the time I am writing this, alone. Their work is not wasted. Their work is not a receipt for a woman. Their work is what makes them worth being alone with, and that is its own reward. If a woman happens to walk in later, she will not have made the man. She will have met the man.

It is not saying women have no work to do. They do. Same work, mostly, adjusted for the specifics of a woman's life. I will get to that, but not on a schedule, and not in every chapter, because I am tired of books that try so hard to be fair on every page that they never say a real thing on any of them. Sometimes I am going to talk to men. Sometimes I am going to talk to women. Sometimes I am going to talk to myself and let you read over my shoulder. Take what applies. Leave what does not.

Somewhere along the way, some of us picked up the idea that being a better man is a competition with other men. The gym has a version of this. So does the church. So does the internet. There is always a leaderboard somewhere, always another man who has more of whatever the moment is measuring, and there is always some corner of you that thinks if you could just outwork him, outearn him, outpray him, out-something him, you would finally be the man you have been trying to be.

That leaderboard is not real. I know it feels real. Half the men on it are looking at the other half thinking the exact same thing you are thinking, and everybody is exhausted, and nobody is any better a man than they were last year.

The only man you have to beat is the one you were yesterday.

That is not a slogan. That is a workload. It means you cannot coast. It also means you cannot fall so far behind that you can never catch up, because the standard resets every morning. The man you were yesterday is not a mountain. He is a doorway. Walk through him.

I have days I do not walk through him. I have days I sit down in the doorway and refuse to move. This book is not written by a man who has beaten the man he was yesterday every day for a decade. This book is written by a man who lost to him plenty and got back up plenty, and is still, at the time of this typing, in the middle of the fight.